“Yeah. Sure,” Henry said, and he and Theta watched the people walking past on Forty-second Street rendered momentarily insubstantial as they stepped through the steam rising from the city’s manholes. In the alley, he and Theta stood side by side, but they’d never been farther apart.
Between his new role as Evie’s pretend fiancé and putting in more hours at the museum now that Will was gone, Sam had found little time to follow up on his Project Buffalo leads. Finally, he managed to slip away and down to his old neighborhood on the Lower East Side. Many businesses were closed due to the sleeping sickness, and Sam had no luck on Orchard Street until a pickle vendor informed him that the Rosenthals had made good and moved to the Bronx.
Now Sam and Evie waited outside the sprawling apartment building on the Grand Concourse, an aspirational Tudor made for Jews who wanted to reinvent themselves once they’d left the crowded tenements of Orchard and Hester Streets—those tenements themselves a remove from the shtetls and ghettos of Russia, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Every building had its ghosts, it seemed.
“I don’t see why I had to come,” Evie groused.
Sam put his fingers to his cheeks, making dimples. “Because you’re my darling fiancée. Everybody loves the Sweetheart Seer!” he said sarcastically. “Oh, one more thing—if she asks, you’re converting to Judaism.”
“What? Sam!”
“Don’t worry. Everything’s jake, Baby Vamp. Just follow my lead.”
“If that’s supposed to be reassuring, it’s not,” Evie grumbled.
They took the stairs, dodging a handful of merry children running amok, and knocked at Mrs. Rosenthal’s door. Anna Rosenthal was rounder and older than the young woman Evie had seen in her vision. She wore glasses now, and a few threads of gray showed in her dulled red hair, but it was unmistakably the same woman. Mrs. Rosenthal uttered a small cry before crushing Sam into a fierce hug. She stood back, shaking her head affectionately as she assessed him. “Sergei!”
She spoke to Sam in Russian, and he answered in kind, faltering a little. “Sorry, Mrs. Rosenthal, my Russian’s a little rusty these days.”
“Everyone forgets,” she said, and Sam couldn’t tell if it was said with sadness or gratitude.